July 29, 2009

Phelps Loses, and a Debate Boils Over

By KAREN CROUSE

ROME  The suspicions and resentments that have been simmering in Italy’s biggest pasta pot, otherwise known as the Foro Italico, reached the boiling point Tuesday on the third night of competition at the world championships.

Stirring the pot was the German Paul Biedermann, who followed his eye-popping world record swim in the 400-meter freestyle on the first evening with an upset of Michael Phelps in the 200-meter freestyle, one of Phelps’s eight gold-medal races at the Beijing Olympics.

Biedermann was timed in 1 minute 42.00, shattering Phelps’s year-old world record of 1:42.96. Phelps touched in 1:43.22, his second-best time but his worst showing on the world stage since the 2005 world championships, in which he failed to make the final in the 400 freestyle.

“It was amazing to swim against Michael Phelps,” Biedermann said. “I was there when he won his eighth gold medal. Just to live this moment and now I’m actually faster than him  I feel absolutely great about it.”

He couldn’t help feeling a little self-conscious, too. If at times he felt defensive, there was a reason. In Beijing, Biedermann finished fifth in 1:46.00. It took Phelps five years to make the same four-second time drop that Biedermann accomplished in 11 months while wearing the Arena X-Glide, one of the polyurethane suits that turn the swimmers’ bodies into sleek kayaks.

An hour before the final, officials with FINA, the sport’s international governing body, held a news conference to announce that last week’s vote to ban the polyurethane suits was ratified, but the date it will take effect remains as much a moving line as the red one on the television that signifies a world-record pace.

Last winter, swimming purists wanted FINA to ban the suits before these championships. Last week, the target date was announced as Jan. 1, 2010. But Cornel Marculescu, the executive director of FINA, said Tuesday that the ban could take effect as late as next spring while the organization tried to decide which textiles to allow.

By the end of the night, Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, had seen and heard enough about floating deadlines.

“Well, then, they can probably expect Michael not to swim until they’ve implemented it,” he said. “I’m done with it. It has to be implemented immediately. The sport is in shambles right now, and they better do something or they’re going to lose their guy who fills these seats.”

Bowman was just getting started. “That would be my recommendation for him, to not swim internationally,” he said. “This mess needs to be stopped right now.” He added, “We’ve lost all the history of the sport.”

Only Dara Torres’s Twitter page is being updated here more than the record books. In the first three days, world records have fallen in 15 of 24 races.

The consensus is that it is the suits  and not the swimmers  that have gotten faster, and in the wake of his victory Tuesday, Biedermann said nothing to lead anybody to believe otherwise.

“I hope there will be a time when I can beat Michael Phelps without the suit,” Biedermann said, adding that the suit debate “is not my problem, it’s not the problem of Arena, my sponsor.”

Biedermann said, “It’s the problem of FINA.”

He seemed to diminish his own accomplishment by adding: “We’re in a dangerous situation of what comes next. It’s really important to go back to the real swimming.”

Phelps, a 14-time Olympic champion, was clad in last year’s cutting-edge suit, the Speedo LZR Racer, which is buoyant but not boatlike. Because he appeared to have to work harder than Biedermann on the first 100 to keep his body high in the water, Phelps had no energy in the end to match his opponent’s finishing kick. Biedermann covered the final 50 in 25.70 to Phelps’s 26.51.

“Deep down inside, I can’t be mad,” said Phelps, who took six months off after Beijing. “I can’t be disappointed. Paul swam a great race.”

Biedermann said: “Maybe Michael is not in the best shape like in Beijing. I think maybe when he is in better shape, he can beat me.”

While FINA hires a scientific committee to decide on a definition of acceptable fabrics, milestones will continue to be ground into dust. So far, these world championships have produced the first woman under four minutes in the 400 freestyle and the second, third, fourth and fifth times men have raced under 59 seconds in the 100 breaststroke.

A post-Olympic year typically is fallow ground for records as many of the top performers take extended breaks from training while others retire. In the year after the 2004 Athens Games, six world records were lowered in individual Olympic events. In 2009, the number is 21 (with a bullet).

The polyurethane foil on the Jaked 01 and the coating of rubber on the Arena X-Glide have buoyed not just the swimmers’ bodies but their self-belief and expectations.

“People believe they can do more,” said Markus Rogan, a Stanford-educated backstroker from Austria. He added: “I’m really in favor of the suits, because we’re the most popular boring sport in the world and so we need and only survive on records. So we’re going to need whatever we can do to keep doing records.”

But for many, the thrill is gone, the days of getting goose bumps when witnessing swimming history replaced by a sense that you have seen it all before.

“We’ve lost all the history of the sport,” Bowman said, adding, “If we took all the records out starting with the LZR and went back to 2007, I would be absolutely fine with that.”

The American breaststroker Eric Shanteau likened what is happening in swimming to the steroids era in baseball. “Some people are like ‘It’s fine’ and some people say it’s cheating,” Shanteau said.

On one thing, many frustrated swimmers seem to agree.

“FINA’s really incompetent in terms of management,” Rogan said. “I mean, it’s like deciding to play soccer one year with a rugby ball, then a soccer ball.”

Bowman was asked if he was confident FINA would straighten out this matter by the spring. “You can’t trust what they say,” he said. “It might be never.”